Spring 2026
Photo by Marion Faller. Image copyright estate of Marion Faller.
“It was a time when the boundaries between intellectual life, artistic life, and everyday social life felt much more porous than they do now. The atmosphere was informal, intense, and very alive. People would sit for hours listening, arguing, smoking, watching films, and continuing conversations afterward. So yes, there was definitely something of that atmosphere around Frampton’s lectures too.” (Bruce Jenkins)
Photos by Marion Faller. Image copyright estate of Marion Faller.
Olga Kobryn and Swann Rembert: The first thing that we want to discuss is your personal relationship with Hollis Frampton — how you met him and came to know him. We are not exactly sure how that encounter happened, so perhaps we could begin there.
Bruce Jenkins: Sure. Let me start with the moment we first met, and then I’ll go back a few years to give some context. I first met Hollis Frampton in April 1976, during what he used to call his “medicine show” tour. He would travel around the country with his latest films, presenting them at universities, media centers, and museums. In April 1976, he made stops in the Midwest. He came to the Chicago area and gave a presentation at Northwestern University, where I was studying at the time. After that, he went on to Madison, Wisconsin, to present another program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I actually traveled up to Madison as well so I could hear him speak there a second time. I vividly remember that first lecture. It is also worth mentioning that Hollis Frampton was forty years old when I met him, whereas I was twenty-four. By then, he was already considered a significant figure in the field.
Olga: Yes, that was exactly my question. By the time you met him, he was already a major figure.
Bruce: Oh, absolutely. He was already an important figure, whereas I was just a graduate student. In fact, I was about to finish my studies and become ABD the following year. I remember that he opened the lecture with his classic biographical sketch. He said something like: “I was the first Caesarean-born baby at Worcester City Hospital in 1936.” And from there, he launched into a discussion of his work. At that point, he had already made nearly fifty films in a dozen or so years, and he was speaking about this immense project he was planning, a film cycle he called Magellan which would take one year and four days to present. From that moment on, for me, it became what I would describe as an extremely steep learning curve.
Olga: Was it mainly a lecture tour, or were there screenings as well?
Bruce: Yes, it was a lecture-screening tour, and this was very common back then. There was actually something called the “Film and Video Makers Travel Sheet,” which came out of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Once a month, you would see where all the experimental filmmakers were booked, and you could then write them and see if they were available to come to your university or your media center or your museum. So, Frampton came to Northwestern, and then he went up to Madison near the end of April 1976. The thing to know about Hollis was that he was a spellbinding speaker. He had this extraordinary voice, and he was both funny and insightful—full of ideas and knowledge and citations and homages.
And so there was enormous amount of content to all of his presentations. And then, of course, there were the films—most likely a group of the “seasonal” works like Summer Solstice and Autumnal Equinox as well as key new films like his Brakhage portrait Otherwise Unexplained Fires. For me, it was quite a deep dive, encountering new works from what I would come to call his “post-critical” period, and finding myself not fully able to comprehend the work, even though I had already decided that I was going to focus my thesis work on his body of filmmaking.
Olga: Is it true that you were able to enlist Frampton to act in one of your student films?
Bruce: Yes, I made this tiny experimental film that I called Mutual Interference, which was kind of a parody of a “structural film” title and utilized the iconic techniques (rephotography, flicker effect, and fixed frame). It was less than two minutes—a little silent black-and-white flicker film of him smoking a cigarette made from a dozen still images in homage to Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion. He was posed in a classroom with a film screen as a background; it had a special ambience of that era.
Olga: Was he smoking during the lectures, and were the students smoking as well? I’m thinking, for instance, of Deleuze’s classes at the University of Vincennes.
Bruce: Yes, yes, people were smoking, and the students were smoking as well. In a way, that detail really says something about the period. It was a time when the boundaries between intellectual life, artistic life, and everyday social life felt much more porous than they do now. The atmosphere was informal, intense, and very alive. People would sit for hours listening, arguing, smoking, watching films, and continuing conversations afterward. So yes, there was definitely something of that atmosphere around Frampton’s lectures too.
Olga: And how many people were present at the lecture?
Bruce: At Northwestern, probably no more than twenty-five or thirty people, because it was held in a fairly small room. In Madison, which was a much larger university, there may have been sixty or seventy people — perhaps even closer to a hundred.
Olga: And what kind of students were they? Were they cinema students, or students from other art departments?
Bruce: No, they were mainly cinema students. Madison had a very strong cinema studies program, along with a smaller filmmaking program. Northwestern was actually quite similar: a robust cinema studies department and a relatively small filmmaking program.
Swann: And, as a side note, I understand that he was invited by James Benning, himself.
Bruce: Yes, that’s right.
Swann: I’ve come across that information several times, but without much context, so I was wondering whether you knew more about it.
Bruce: Sure. At the time, there were just two people teaching film production at Northwestern. One of them was James Benning, and the other was a man named Dana Hodgdon. And Dana would have had no real interest in Hollis Frampton’s work. Benning, on the other hand, was a filmmaker who developed particular set of formal strategies that at times felt very adjacent to the “structural” model. He would have obviously been the one who would have been the point person to extend the invitation and secure the funds to pay Frampton, and maybe even hosted him when he stayed overnight in Evanson. I took photographs when we all went up to Madison, and I’ve got one of Frampton and James Benning and his then-partner Bette Gordon together.
Bruce Jenkins, Madison, WI, April 1976 (Hollis Frampton in the foreground, unknown woman, Bette Gordon, James Benning).
Olga: But what exactly was the relationship between Benning and Frampton?
Bruce: I believe that Benning understood that Frampton had opened a path for filmmakers like him. Benning had been trained as a mathematician and was teaching mathematics. Frampton was deeply influenced by mathematical theories as well (set theory ala Zorns Lemma, for example). Benning saw that there was room for a filmmaker from the American heartland within this experimental tradition. Frampton and Michael Snow were especially important. Snow’s landscape films and camera movement works like Wavelength or Back and Forth were formative for Benning. Eventually Benning made Grand Opera, which is in many ways an homage to all of them.
Olga: Did he ever work with Frampton?
Bruce: No, and he never studied with Frampton either. But, I have just said, Frampton traveled constantly showing his work. Every couple of years he would go on tour through universities and media centers, screening his new films. Benning most likely would have encountered him through that circuit.
Swann: Returning to that film you made with Frampton, was there a James Benning sound mix in your film?
Bruce: Originally, no, but years later in 2014, James and I were co-teaching “Shooting Landscapes,” a studio class at Ox-Bow in Michigan, which served as my school’s summer program. One day he showed me some new work from a series of what was slated to be 52 films that all related to earlier films and based on appropriated images, some of them were taken off the internet. A few weeks after the course ended, he emailed me: “I remember you made a film of Frampton. Can I get the footage? I want to do something with it.” And what he did was to turn it into one of his 52 films. You might say HF is a collaborative film with Benning slowing down my film and inserting portions of the soundtrack from nostalgia, the autobiographical voiceover that Frampton had his friend and colleague Michael Snow read.
James Benning, HF (2014)
Olga: Let’s return to your education, and ask how did you end up studying cinema?
Bruce: Well, before I went to graduate school, my wife Janet and I both applied to the few schools that had doctoral programs in both cinema studies and linguistics (she was a French major and aspired then to be a linguist). I chose cinema studies based on my time at New York University both in classes and as a projectionist for P. Adams Sitney and running this little Athena projector for Annette Michelson, who was doing frame-by-frame analysis of Vertov and early René Clair. At the time there were only five schools in the U.S. that had both doctoral programs, and we ended up at Northwestern. She got a university fellowship, and I got a scholarship. And so we thought we would go there. And when I went there, I encountered Peter Wollen, who was a spellbinding teacher and very charismatic, and was there teaching a course on reflexive cinema. While I had had this robust introduction to the American film avant-garde at NYU, here I was encountering the other avant-garde with Peter showing Straub/Huillet, Godard, and works with a distinctively political edge, and subtly making the case for us students that this was the kind of cinema we should focus on. So, I developed a kind of split allegiance within what Peter would declare in a celebrated article the “two avant-gardes.”
I would soon begin working on the “other avant-garde” that Peter Wollen had championed. I became immersed in Straub/Huillet, and while still a graduate student helped sponsor their first visit to the Midwest in 1975 when they came to Northwestern to show Moses and Aaron. I still vividly recall Janet and I driving them around Chicago, where they asked to see where the black people lived, and where the old buildings were, not fully aware that a building built in the late 19th-century was an old building. There was nothing before that; they’d all burned in the great fire.
This continued after I entered the field 1979 as the film programmer at Media Study/Buffalo; I was both writing about Straub/Huillet films and showing their work. Nevertheless, my first allegiance was to the work that Michelson and Sitney embraced. While Sitney had written the “structural film” article for Film Culture, Michelson was no less important. She wrote a major piece on Michael Snow and, as you know, was the one who invited Frampton to begin publishing his essays, first at Artforum, and then at October. And it was her former students like Bill Simon and Lucy Fischer, who authored many of those early pieces on Frampton’s films.
Olga: Please talk a little about writing the thesis itself.
Bruce: I already have this backstory of being at NYU and of seeing his work and many other experimental films through the lens of Sitney and Michelson. And while I was well acquainted with the critical notion of “structural film,” it completely breaks down with Frampton’s work on Magellan, and so by the time I meet him, Frampton is making films that don’t at all cohere to this structural model. When I begin writing my thesis, I realize that, yes, there is a period of time in the later 1960s and early 1970s when he’s making “structural film,” or things that look like structural film. I came to call that body of Frampton’s work the “critical period.”
Before that, he’s also making things that don’t particularly resemble structural films; I called that era the “pre-critical period;” and then he’s making this massive film, Magellan, which I had to label the “post-critical period,” because people literally weren’t writing about it. So, the canonical films such as Zorns Lemma and works from Hapax Legomena don’t prove to be that helpful when you begin looking at Magellan. And this is one of the many things that I owe to Frampton, who understood that I might be someone who was willing to do the necessary work to critically address his later films and thereby help to get all of that work out into the world. And in the end, I hoped that his faith in me was repaid starting with the doctoral thesis and almost immediately after that working on a gallery exhibition for the Albright-Knox (now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum) that became a posthumous show—the first museum exhibition of what Frampton called the “flat stuff,” together with the films.
Installation view of Hollis Frampton: Recollections/Recreations. Image courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Digital Assets Collection and Archives, Buffalo, New York.
Swann: Could you tell us something about this exhibition?
Bruce: Yes, and let’s start with the exhibition catalogue, and what’s interesting is that it was published by the museum and by the MIT Press, which was the university press that twenty-five years later would eventually publish his collected writings On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters. The exhibition Recollections and Recreations was organized by one of the gallery’s main curators Susan Krane and me, but if you look at the first page of the book, which describes the entire body of work that’s shown, this was written by Hollis Frampton in his hospital bed. So echoing his words, the show comprises “much of the other work of Hollis Frampton during the years 1958–1984 especially celebrating three grand collaborations with Marion Faller namely: Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion (1975), False Impressions (1979), Rites of Passage (1983-84).” The rest include “numerous collaborations, gifts to others both accepted and rejected, several findings and outright thefts, all brought together with sundry original works of that same time largely and surreptitiously recreated or recollected for the present occasion.”
The show opened in the fall of 1984 about six months after his death in late March. Michael Snow was there opening night, and both Frank Stella and Carl Andre visited the exhibition soon after. As you might imagine, 1984 was just a kind of cataclysmic year for us, and there was something deeply poignant about the exhibition.
Olga: Oh, really?
Bruce: Yes, Frampton was already dying, and I remember him writing by hand not only the texts, but also those little hexagons on the frontispiece. So there is a handwritten version of this that is likely in his papers somewhere. So you see that this exhibition was entirely his vision, what the title would be, and what the show would include.
Olga: Can you tell us more about how his films were included.
Bruce: Yes, there were four programs of film, for which I wrote the program notes and may have done introductions. And I more or less used the period divisions and individual film descriptions from my thesis.
Olga: What about all the “flat stuff” in it?
Bruce: It’s fairly extensive. Besides the three series he made with Marion, there was the entirety (52 images) from The Secret World of Frank Stella (1959–1962) that captures the life and times of this young artist in gorgeous monochrome photographs. For this occasion, Frampton had what he titled The Nostalgia Portfolio printed and displayed with the matching texts. Similarly his late color photographic series ADSVMVS ABSVMVS (1982) was displayed with image and texts. There was Xerographic work from his By Any Other Name which used product labels reversing the brand name and the contents (“Tuna Brand Chunk Light Bumblebees”). And the museum did something remarkable and organized an adjacent gallery that included work by several of Frampton’s more celebrated collaborators including paintings by Stella, Larry Poons, and James Rosenquist (with Frampton’s spaghetti images) and sculpture by Andre and Snow.
Olga: And after the structural filmmakers — besides Benning — who else belongs to that lineage?
Bruce: Benning is interesting because his work comes from the formal side of structural film, but it also begins to embrace narrativity—creating a distinctively American form of “slow cinema.” Su Friedrich is another important figure, who was deeply influenced by Frampton, but also brought autobiography and narrativity into the work.
Olga: It’s interesting because we don’t speak enough about Su Friedrich.
Su Friedrich, Scar Tissue (1979). Courtesy of LightCone.
Bruce: I agree completely. But you should know that one of my earliest publications was actually about Su Friedrich in an article for the 20th Anniversary Special Edition issue of Millennium Film Journal on her short film Gently Down the Stream.
Olga: And perhaps Chantal Akerman too? In a similar transitional position between structure and narrative?
Bruce: Yes, I think Chantal Akerman is in some ways the European equivalent of what Benning represents in the United States. She synthesizes the two avant-gardes that Peter Wollen talked about: the political modernist cinema and the structural or formalist tendency. People often describe Akerman as belonging to a “second New Wave.” She comes after the French New Wave but extends it into something both more nuanced and structural. And, as my recent research has confirmed, she was deeply influenced by her year-long stay in the early 1970s in New York, where she encountered the work of Warhol, Snow, and Frampton.
Olga: Your vision of film history is extremely structured. You should write it this way.
Bruce: The funny thing is that at the time you don’t realize you are making those choices. You just keep writing and following connections. It took me years to understand that I was really a media arts historian. I wrote extensively on the work of Marcel Broodthaers, Bruce Conner, Gordon Matta-Clark who made film and video— and only later realized that they were all part of the same constellation.
Olga: Yes, you can make the amazing links. Who else would you cite as part of Frampton’s heritage?
Bruce: I think you could look at someone like Jim Jarmusch. And here, it is worthwhile acknowledging that the great historian of this era may well be Jim Hoberman, who wrote a weekly column on film for the Village Voice. He’s doing something similar to what Jonas Mekas did in the late 1950s and 1960s: he goes out, sees work, writes about it, and eventually is able to assemble it into a more holistic, historic form.
What you begin to see then are artists who seem to be rejecting things—like the No Wave scene in New York in the late 1970s and early 80s—which is both a reaction against poetic and avant-garde cinema, and also, strangely enough an embrace of some of the same protocols, formal devices, and modes of making we see in Frampton. So, you get someone like Amos Poe, and it feels like Warhol in long takes, but it also clearly comes from the work Frampton and Michael Snow were doing a decade earlier.
Olga: What is the relationship between Warhol and Frampton?
Bruce: That’s actually a very difficult question. Frampton and Michael Snow, the two key figures in this moment, developed a new vision of experimental filmmaking—and they intensely disliked Warhol, I believe, not because they rejected his social world, but because Warhol had arrived at this new form without what they considered the proper amount of intellectual labor. You know Warhol’s flippant statement “press a button and the film comes out.” By the way, virtually none of his films actually work that way, but I think the discourse around his films really bothered Frampton and Snow. It seems that almost by accident Warhol discovers a new form, and this is something that Sitney points out early on, too. Isn’t it interesting that Warhol’s working with the long take, fixed frame or the fixed camera, and a shape—the three-minute screen test?
Warhol came from painting, and his way of working in film represents an extension of painterly procedures. In a sense, if you extract the DNA of Warhol, you get something surprisingly close to structural film. But Frampton—who was deeply embedded in the world of writers, poets, and artists—saw Warhol as almost thoughtless, someone without ideas. And I think there was resentment: Warhol arrived quickly, without the immersion in poetry, music, painting, dance, and theory that he and Snow had gone through.
There was also the issue of influence and recognition. Jonas Mekas was, at the time, the only major public voice writing regularly about experimental film in the Village Voice, and he was a strong supporter of Warhol. That mattered.
Olga: Frampton defined the idea of the artist’s lab, of cinema as a factory of practice notably in his text Processing Parameters (1976).[1] Did he ever comment on Warhol’s Factory?
Bruce: I think he rejected it entirely. Frampton is very “old school.” He sees his lineage in Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein and Vertov—filmmakers who were both politically engaged and theoretically rigorous, who reflected on their practice while making it. For him, filmmaking was not “art for art’s sake,” but something with social agency and intellectual depth. He valued artists who were literate across disciplines—poetry, theater, modern art. So when I say “old school,” I mean he believed you had to be both theorist and maker. You had to do everything yourself: shoot, edit, control the process. Early on, when he sent films to laboratories, they damaged them, so he became increasingly hands-on.
Olga: But he did work with labs later, didn’t he?
Bruce: Yes, later he gained more control. He worked with people like Bill Brand and used optical printing in very sophisticated ways. One of my favorite early films of his is Manual of Arms. You really feel his elaborate camera strategies and editing structures. He builds both mental and physical “muscle” for making complex films.
Olga: And what about Frampton’s relation to structural film theory? Especially its political or social dimension?
Bruce: Frampton, like Michael Snow and others, resisted being reduced to pure formalism. He always felt there was a political and social vision embedded in the work. He saw himself as drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of art, poetry, discourse, and contemporary politics. His films were meant to operate on multiple levels. For example, Magellan is about colonialism—it’s not just a formal structure. But because he was first “discovered” through formal readings, his work was often reduced to things like loop printing, flicker effects, or metric structures.
Olga: Why did he choose such formal, almost mathematical structures?
Bruce: I think it’s how his mind worked. And also, he understood film as a medium that is itself metric—frames, feet of film, timing systems. There’s also a connection to poetry here. One of his close friends, Carl Andre, was working in concrete poetry, which is also based on structure, modules, and formal expansion.
Olga: So poetry was both formal and political much as the advanced forms of film. One can also find similar approaches in Soviet Constructivism, as well as in Vertov’s theories of intervals. But I think that for Frampton, the influence of poetry as a structure — notably Ezra Pound — must have been an important point of inspiration and departure?
Bruce: Exactly. And Frampton was very much shaped by his generation. He came of age in the Beat era—he literally looked like a Beat figure: sandals, narrow pants, a beard and long hair. At that time, poetry was central. Frampton spent nearly a year literally sitting at Pound’s feet during the poet’s confinement at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. Everyone wanted to be a poet, and then suddenly everyone wanted to be a filmmaker. As Frampton has amusingly stated, he even tried writing poetry and realized that he was not a poet, and moved onto visual work—but retained the centrality of a metric structure.
Olga: What was his relationship to P. Adams Sitney’s theory of structural film?
Bruce: He may well have been somewhat resentful. Sitney’s early essay didn’t initially give him a central place, and even when he was included, Frampton felt the definition of structural film was too limiting. It reduced the work to formal features: loops, flicker, duration. But for Frampton, that was only one layer.
Olga: Did he agree with Sitney at all?
Bruce: I think he knew him and likely disagreed with him. There were, no doubt, tensions in New York at the time. Everyone knew each other—Annette Michelson, Sitney, Frampton—they were all part of the same environment. Frampton was very close to Annette Michelson, who supported him and published his work in October and Artforum. I think he felt that she understood his work more historically and deeply, while he saw Sitney’s approach as more descriptive and limited.
Olga: But isn’t Sitney’s idea also that structure itself can be expressive?
Bruce: Yes, absolutely—and I agree with that. Sitney was enormously important. In his later years, especially after retiring, he returned to these films and produced much deeper readings of Frampton, Snow, and Brakhage. Those late essays are extremely insightful. So even if there were disagreements, Sitney’s contribution remains fundamental to how we think about structural film and contemporary cinema.
Olga: I would like to ask you about your work editing Hollis Frampton’s texts in On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters[2]. Could you tell us about your selection? How did you select the texts?
Bruce: Thank you for asking it that way. Frampton did this really perfect book (Circles of Confusion[3]), so beautiful and so essential, but it was a small edition. It was out of print almost immediately. These are very expensive now to buy.
Olga: It was Frampton who edited it himself, while he was alive?
Bruce: Yes, absolutely. It was Frampton who put it together. It was published the year before he died, in 1983. He didn’t know he was going to die, of course. At the time, he was still living upstate, near Rochester, New York. In the late seventies he knew that Rochester was one of the great places for studying photography, obviously, and it was also very supportive of his work and of his partner Marion Faller’s work. So he did this extraordinary book, and then it went out of print. You could still go back and read the articles that were originally in Artforum or October, and some pieces had appeared elsewhere, but it wasn’t easy to reconstruct the whole thing. I won’t say I thought of it exactly this way, but I suppose I felt that if I were going to devote time to Frampton, I would rather make his work available than write my own interpretation of it. Marion Faller, after Frampton died, always called me “Frampton’s biographer,” which is ironic because I never wrote a biography of him, and I don’t think I really could. When MIT Press approached me, I had to make a choice. I could have published my dissertation, written a biography, or get his work out there. So, I opted to focus on these primary documents and make them accessible. This said, there were two important factors. First, not everything Frampton wrote ended up in Circles of Confusion. He had to make choices. Second, there were often multiple versions of the same essays: the original manuscript, the version submitted to Octoberor Artforum, the printed version, then the version that appeared in his book.
Olga : You mentioned that your wife and close collaborator, Janet Jenkins, who is a trained linguist, also knew Hollis’s voice and understood his cadences. As you told me during our last conversation, when you’re a poet, how things sound really matters, and the oral aspect of his work is very important. Knowing the cadence of his voice, you went through and compared all the different versions of his texts—sometimes having two or three versions of the same piece—and decided, for example, that passages dropped in October needed to be restored. You aimed to reflect the flow of his voice and the logic of his argument as it unfolded, which had been interrupted in certain ways, and wanted to restore the language so that it would truly flow. Could you tell us more about this process of selecting and comparing texts from multiple versions, and how you approached maintaining fidelity to the oral qualities of Frampton’s speech in the final editions?
Bruce: As you mention, Janet was a trained linguist and knew Hollis very well enough to recognize the cadences of his voice within his writings. And this may well have been connected to the fact that many of these texts originated as lectures, so there was always an oral dimension. So what we did first was compare all these versions. Sometimes we had two or three different drafts of a text. We would notice that something had been removed in the magazine publication and think: no, that really belongs there.
But we also discovered something amusing: there were an extraordinary number of commas. We joked that Hollis Frampton wasn’t paid by the word but by the comma. There were commas everywhere. And when you read the text aloud, it became very staccato, very interrupted. So, we spent hours — dozens of hours — removing commas.
Olga : Maybe you were wrong! Maybe they should have stayed!
Bruce : No, because when we read the texts with all those commas, the rhythm became jerky. It didn’t flow. We wanted to restore the movement of his voice, the logic of the argument as it unfolded when he spoke.
Olga : So you wanted to reproduce the way he actually sounded giving a lecture?
Bruce : Exactly. One hundred percent. And honestly, that could only be done by people who had known him personally and spent time listening to him — whether during lectures, over dinner, or simply in conversation.
Olga : And regarding your selection for the book: Frampton gave so many talks. How did you decide what to include?
Bruce : Well, one thing I wanted was to preserve everything that had already appeared in Circles of Confusion. One of the most important additions, I think, was a letter Frampton wrote to the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA had offered him a retrospective but without paying rental fees or covering the actual costs. In the letter, he meticulously details how everyone else involved is being compensated while he himself is expected to pay for cleaning and shipping the prints, repairing them afterward, even covering his own travel expenses from Buffalo.
It’s an extraordinary letter — almost like something written by a forensic accountant. Every filmmaker or artist dealing with institutions should read it. I also included a wonderful interview conducted by Bill Simon, one of Annette Michelson’s students, which explores Magellan in depth. And then there were smaller texts: reviews Frampton wrote about the photographic work of friends, including Marion Faller, and little capsule pieces that revealed another side of his writing.
Olga : Is there something missing from the book that you now wish you had included?
Bruce : Yes, perhaps. Several people have pointed out that Circles of Confusion opens with a sequence of images — almost like a visual poem. They aren’t merely illustrations of the essays ; there’s a logic connecting them. At the time, when I worked with MIT Press, there were budget constraints. I decided to prioritize reproducing images from the films, the photographic work, the xerographs, the collages — because without those materials readers would have no clear sense of Frampton’s visual practice.
MIT did ask me whether I wanted to reproduce the plates from Circles of Confusion. At the time I thought they were less essential. Now, I understand that for many people they were actually very important. But my priority was to bring the writing back into circulation and to make Frampton’s visual work accessible again because so much of it had become impossible to see once the original book as well as the Recollections/Recreations exhibition catalogue went out of print.
Olga : I was wondering: when did this project become concrete for you?
Bruce : Partly because MIT Press had begun this extraordinary series on artists’ writings — the Writing Art series, overseen by Roger Conover. There were already books by artists close to Frampton, like Carl Andre and Yvonne Rainer. I think MIT began to realize that Frampton belonged in that constellation: artists whose work and writing were inseparable. Among filmmakers of that generation, Frampton was probably the greatest writer. Brakhage wrote beautifully, of course, and there are texts by Michael Snow and Paul Sharits, but no one was as committed to writing as Frampton.
So MIT approached me and, after that conversation, I spoke with Janet because this was truly an editorial process. It involved understanding the relations between all these texts. Some people later questioned the title, On the Camera Arts, wondering whether Frampton himself would have liked it. But to me it seemed natural, since he moved constantly between photography, film, and other lens-based practices.
Olga : So, in a way, you curated the texts as much as you edited them?
Bruce : Yes, exactly. We could simply have called the book Circles of Confusion again — an expanded version. But I didn’t want to diminish the importance of Frampton’s original book. That was his own great achievement. So, I thought of this newer volume almost as a continuation — like an Old Testament and a New Testament.
Olga: While working in the Joyce Wieland fonds at the Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections at York University, I discovered a handwritten letter from Joyce Wieland addressed to you, which you apparently never received, and which begins as follows: “Following up from our telephone conversation last week, I have begun work on the Frampton Film …[4]” Could you tell me the story of the making of this film – A & B in Ontario – and your own involvement?
Bruce: I was so surprised and rather happy to see this. I thought it was perhaps a draft. Well, the thing is that when you look at the finished work, it’s a brilliant film. Joyce edited Hollis’s reels and her own reels, she did the foley work, and it’s really one of the great short films of that period—a doubled portrait of two artists. It was 1966. They were both very busy and on the verge of making important early works.They created this little cat-and-mouse game with the camera. It’s really two filmmakers who deeply respected each other but also enjoyed taking a playful approach to making a film.
Olga: So, you only had Frampton’s footage?
Bruce: Exactly. I had only Frampton’s reel; I had never seen Joyce’s footage. To give some context, when Hollis Frampton died, his widow Marion Faller was deeply focused on preserving all of the work and making sure it entered institutions capable of preserving it and making it accessible. There was this unfinished reel, and although I was technically co-executor, Marion was really the mastermind. She said: “We should do something with this.” I looked at it and thought immediately that Joyce Wieland was the right person to have this footage. So, with Marion’s approval, I sent it to Joyce and told her that only she could finish it.
Here, I should perhaps mention that there was a steady stream of Buffalo-based filmmakers, who routinely shipped their own films to labs in Toronto for processing and printing. I was enlisted at one point to assist Paul Sharits with getting his film material onto a Toronto-bound bus across the border in Fort Erie, Ontario. It was a bit nerve-wracking to say “nothing to declare” to the border guards. Those labs were far superior to the ones in Buffalo and cheaper as the work was priced in Canadian dollars.
Olga: And in the letter she talks about money. Who helped finance the project?
Bruce: Canada had much more public funding for the arts at that time. Media Study/Buffalo had a great track record in creating touring film and video programs. So, while we couldn’t provide financial support, we could handle distribution. In this particular case, I had been in contact with Ulrich Gregor from the Forum section of the Berlinale. One year he planned to travel up to Buffalo during his annual fall visit to New York and asked me to show him some work. So I screened the recently completed A and B in Ontario in my living room, projecting it directly on the wall for Ulrike. He loved it, and the following February the film premiered at the Berlinale.
Olga: I think Joyce Wieland’s editing changed the film. It’s not only structural; it’s also sensitive.
Bruce: Absolutely. This work lovingly brings the thirty-year-old Hollis Frampton in his period Beat-era shades and sandals back to life, bestowing an enormous gift upon his family and friends after a lengthy period of pain and sadness. What a gift!
Bruce Jenkins
Olga Kobryn
Swann Rembert
[1] Hollis Frampton, « Processing Parameters » (1976), Millenium Film Journal, n° 56, « Material Practice – From Sprockets to Binaries », Automne 2012, p. 74-87. Texte traduit en français par Benoit Turquety : Hollis Frampton, « Paramètres de traitement », n° 87, revue 1895, 2019.
[2] On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton, The Writings of Hollis Frampton, ed. Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press, 2009.
[3] Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion: Film/Photography/Video Texts 1968–1980 (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983).
[4] Joyce Wieland, an unsent letter to Bruce Jenkins, file “A&B in Ontario Lab Info,” Box 1999-003/012, Joyce Wieland Collection, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, York University, Toronto, Canada.